The first digital form I made was a pdf form of the paper form. I used this to fill out requisitions for myself because I just didn’t like paper. I experimented with google forms. This would dump the requisition into a Google Spreadsheet and email decision makers. I recently built a great requisition form using Planning Center Forms Planning Center is great. The form lets us see the form responses and emails the details to the decision makers, but that’s where the magic stops. After a form has been filled out there is no system to track it.
Issues with Digital Forms:
After the form is sent it goes to email, but you can’t respond to the email. The sending address is a “no-reply@” address.
Even if you could respond there is still no way for all the stake holders to see where their requisition is in the process. We don’t want to bog down people with the back and forth of “I thought they just purchased ping pong balls! How many ping pong balls can a youth group use in a year?”
When you submit a form and get no response, and have no status updates it feels like people don’t care. Even if they are working hard and communicating internally the lack of communication feels yucky to the requisitioner.
The decision makers are now on their own to figure out how to deal with the requisition. Treasurer needs to check the budget and availability of funds and give that information to the executive pastor who then needs to magically juggle all this info in their brain and decide if we should purchase this thing now or later or never.
Requisitions lack context. How much has this ministry requisitioned already this year? Where do they stand on their budget? How many requisitions did we already approve this week? How much have we already committed to outstanding requisitions? How was the giving this week? Do we have the cashflow to spend $500 on children’s curriculum right now? These questions require math. And you can only do the math if you print out the emails or export the form results to a spread sheet and do some spreadsheet magic. Either the Treasurer or the Executive Pastor has to manually track these things if they want context.
Manually tracking stuff leads to errors.
Even if the requisition is approved we still have to print a check or notify a person they can use an expense card.
Reporting & Projection:
The final issue is that a ministry leader has no idea where they are at in their spending for the year unless they track it, or the Treasurer provides them with a report. This creates busy work for the Treasurer. The Treasurer & Executive Pastor is also flooded with requisitions.
Reporting & Projection Issues:
We purchase some things regularly so that means lots of requisitions. If we don’t make requisitions than there’s no way to track this week’s outgoing expenses. If you don’t know what’s going out then how can you approve a requisition? The regular spending of toilet paper, paper towels, cups, plates, coffee etc can fluctuate. These are purchased at varying intervals of time. Some are purchased every 3 months, some every week, some once a year. Neither requisition system tracks these expenses.
There is no projection of what will be spent at regular intervals without lots of admin work.
Ministries run on cycles and if the cycles are aligned then we may be purchasing several curriculum packages at the same time the heating bill skyrockets. It would be nice for the requisition system to nudge ministry leaders that they spent a large sum last August and maybe they should submit that requisition in April rather than wait till the last minute.
Great people are not great at all the things. Sometimes people are great with teaching, or people, and teams, but bad with paper and remembering stuff. We limit who can serve when our systems don’t account for this. The administratively gifted people in the body of Christ should not have to bear all the burden of catching the dropped pieces.
What solution have you found for these issues?